


even as a shadow

by kosy



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Character Death, Discussions of Morality, Every Ghost Story Is A Love Story, Found Family, Gen, Moral Ambiguity, Season/Series 10, and found family's evil little sister:, it's jaylen though so it's fine in the end, lost family, something something natural selfishness of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28085139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: “What was it like?” he asks before he can think any better of it, and Sutton doesn’t turn around, but she hums in question, so he continues, “Like, you don’t have to tell me, of course, but I was just—”“What was what like?”Mike scrubs harder at a stain on the counter that he thinks has probably been here longer than he has. “The first few years after Jaylen…” He trails off.She’s silent for a beat, then: “...came back?”“Yeah,” he says guiltily.
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Sutton Dreamy, Mike Townsend & Sutton Dreamy
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23





	even as a shadow

**Author's Note:**

> hi all! i'm back again with another fic in the dreamyjaylen cinematic universe. for context: this is set in the postseason of s10, a few weeks after jaylen was feedbacked into the hall of flame, and mike has been crashing at sutton dreamy's place in baltimore with the two of them since getting unshadowed at the end of s9. 
> 
> content notes: the usual murder/death, grief, moral ambiguity, and general blaseball-style horror regarding those subjects.
> 
> title from _Herakles:_ "Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream."

Sutton’s in the kitchen humming some melody Mike sort of half-recognizes, probably getting started on dinner. For his part, he’s falling asleep on the couch, but not with any real goal to it. The novel he’s been working through for the last season is propped open facedown on his chest, maybe three-quarters of the way done, so he’ll probably finish that in the next few weeks. The Garages didn’t make the postseason this go-around, and he can’t say he’s that disappointed. 

His eyes drift closed. He might nap before dinner’s ready. They have time for these things now.

“Mike?” Sutton calls from the kitchen, just as he’s on the edge of unconsciousness. “I think your sourdough is almost done, if you want to come check on it.” 

He startles, and the book slides off his chest onto the floor. “Huh?” 

“Your bread. The timer has a good couple minutes left, but you know how the oven is.”

“Right,” he mumbles, and pushes himself to his feet, limbs heavy. His last few loaves have been overdone, and honestly he’d forgotten the bread was in there anyway, so. Probably smart for him to go and see. 

She pokes her head around to look into the living room. “You alright in there?” 

“Yeah, I’m good,” he says, trudging around the couch and into the kitchen. “Just was falling asleep.” 

“Oh. Sorry for waking you, then. I can take out the bread myself when—” 

“No, if I’m gonna be staying here any longer, I should probably figure out how long this thing takes to bake bread,” he mutters, crouching to squint into the oven, and he catches Sutton smile out of the corner of his eye, a quick thing. 

They haven’t actually _talked_ about Mike staying in the apartment indefinitely. Mike had assumed he’d move out once season ten was up, except that when he’d brought it up offhand a few weeks back Sutton had just looked confused and a little hurt. He changed the subject and hasn’t mentioned it again since. So maybe he’ll stick around longer. Plus the idea of moving into another lonely apartment in Seattle. Sucks. There probably are worse things in the world than turning into a Baltimorean. 

Sure enough, though, the loaf’s already done, so he pulls it out and leaves it to cool on the rack above the stove. “Probably a good thing you woke me,” he admits, and Sutton shrugs noncommittally, already having busied herself again with setting out ingredients for dinner. “Anything I can help with here?” 

She scans the counters. “Honestly, if you wouldn’t mind clearing up your stuff from earlier—” 

“Oh! Shit, yeah, of course. I swear I was gonna clean it up anyway after I took out the bread.” 

“Sure you were, Mike,” she grins. 

“I would’ve!” he protested. “Seriously, out of the three of us, I’m the best about this kind of thing.” Sutton’s silent, and he realizes a moment too late what he’d said. “I mean, I—sorry.” Fuck, what’s he supposed to do, correct to _the two of us_? Isn’t that worse?

“It’s fine,” she says softly, staring down at her hands. She stands completely still. “It isn’t like you were tr—” 

“Still,” he says. “Dumb mistake.” Losing Jaylen once was hard enough. Twice just feels cruel. It aches worse to do it all over again. The newly silent apartment, the dinners that should have been shared, the bed occupied by only one body. 

She doesn’t come home to them as a ghost, but she haunts the spaces she left empty. She refuses to be forgotten. 

There are times Mike hates her for her selfishness. 

“It’s fine,” Sutton repeats, and just like that she’s back in motion again, walking to the fridge and tugging it open with a little too much force. He turns back to sponging down the counters, putting mixing bowls in the sink. They aren’t both grieving alone this time. That’s. Something, at least. Not like a whole lot of other people are grieving her at this point, after everything. 

“What was it like?” he asks before he can think any better of it, and Sutton doesn’t turn around, but she hums in question, so he continues, “Like, you don’t have to tell me, of course, but I was just—”

“What was what like?” 

Mike scrubs harder at a stain on the counter that he thinks has probably been here longer than he has. “The first few years after Jaylen…” He trails off. 

She’s silent for a beat, then: “...came back?”

“Yeah,” he says guiltily. “I don’t want to, I dunno, open any old wounds, but—” 

“It’s fine. I guess you wouldn’t have known her while...” 

“Nope. Kinda busy being dead. Or, you know, not _dead,_ but.” 

Sutton snorts. “Right.” 

The stain’s not going anywhere. “Yeah. So…?” 

“Yeah,” she echoes. Pulls a knife out of the drawer by the sink, starts chopping carrots into thin disks. “It was… I don’t know. It was a strange time. At first—like, the first third of the regular season or so—nobody really knew what it meant to be in Debt.” The capital D is painfully clear in her voice, and she pauses before bringing the knife down again. “Or what it meant to be Unstable.” 

“But then Ruby Tuesday happened,” he prompts. He’s pieced the story together from what feels like a hundred different accounts. It feels like the kind of thing he should have experienced firsthand along with everyone else, but. 

“Mhm. I got home before she did that night, and she walked in the door and she was—” She grimaces. “I don’t know how to describe it. Off? I guess? Well, she was already off and had been for months. Even more so that night, though.”

“I mean, fuckin’— _yeah,_ I’d assumed so.” 

“Well. Yeah. So she was _off,_ talking a mile a minute, checking her pulse constantly, and I asked if she did what she’d done on purpose, and she was—well, I guess you already know how she gets when she’s in the wrong and doesn’t want to admit it, yeah. Elusive and weird, and she still somehow thinks she’s a good liar, but she’s really, really not.”

He snorts. “Yeah.” He’s almost got the flour and other assorted dough detritus off the counter, so he starts on the dishes. Something more to do with his hands. 

She raises her voice a bit to be heard over the water. “I didn’t have much of a way to be sure, so I just assumed she had and she was going to continue to do so, and I told her we’d figure it out as we went. And that was the end of the conversation. After that—” 

“You—hang on, _what?”_ he says, incredulous. She starts to repeat herself, and he cuts her off. “No, I heard you, I just—what?” 

“What do you mean?” she asks, setting the knife down on the cutting board and looking over at him. Her brows are furrowed. 

“I don’t—you told her you’d just figure it out as you went?” He turns off the faucet, and now they’re just staring at each other across the kitchen. 

“I. Yes? There wasn’t much in the way of other options.” 

“You could’ve—” He gestures emphatically at her, momentarily lost for words. “I don’t know! Not let her just keep _doing_ it, at least!” 

Sutton crosses her arms and leans back against the counter, and when she regards him her gaze is cold in a way that he doesn’t recognize, even after nearly a year of living with her. “Mike. It was that or let her die.” 

“You didn’t even _argue_ with her?” He can feel his voice pitching higher, but he can’t make himself calm down, not about this. Not about the twelve _deaths_ he’d helped cause. 

She laughs, devoid of humor. “No, we definitely argued later on. But not directly about that, if that makes sense. Just the consequences of it. Challenging the baseline assumption that she was going to continue living and continue killing to do it—I don’t think that would have done us any good. She wasn’t gonna stop. And we had to keep going somehow.” 

He just stares at her for a long few seconds. “So you just—” 

“Accepted it. Yes.” She turns her back on him, returns to the pile of vegetables, starts dicing an onion. “Everyone else thought I was crazy, obviously, but it wasn’t... I don’t know. I was always thinking about it, always trying to rationalize and justify and figure out where I drew the line and try to untangle why I felt the way I felt, but at end of the day the choice itself was simple. I loved her. She didn’t want to die. I didn’t want her to die either.” Her voice turns so bitter then that it settles on Mike’s chest, a physical weight. “Not that any of that made a difference in the long run, I guess.” 

He hadn’t seen Jaylen’s second death coming which was, in retrospect, a naive assumption. Believing anybody in this game would just _stay alive_ is and always has been a mistake. Mike hadn’t been watching the fan side of things close enough this season, though. He didn’t even know Jaylen had died again in another stupid fucking idolboard plot until he got the shaky-voiced phone call from Sutton about it. By then, it was over an hour too late. 

“So all that and it was for nothing.” 

This time the knife slams down on the cutting board and he winces at the noise, but she still doesn’t turn around. “You’re wrong.” There’s a shudder of laughter on the edge of the words, twisting and a little hysterical, and he doesn’t want to push when they’re both hurting but he can’t leave it be either.

 _“How?”_ he demands. “She killed all those people, I _died_ for her, and she just ended up dead again! What the fuck was the _point,_ Sutton?”

“Four more years of life isn’t _nothing,_ Mike, we—” She shakes her head. “Wouldn’t you have done the same?” Even from across the kitchen, he can tell she’s gripping the counter so hard her knuckles are turning white, can see the hunch of her shoulders, the curl of the straight spine. “Wouldn’t you do it all over again even now?”

He breathes out, long and hard. “I don’t know.” Sutton nods, considering. If she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it.

“I do,” she says softly, and it’s barely more than a breath. “I still would. I’ll bring her back again if I can find a way, even if she’s in debt again. I’d bring her back as many times as it took.” 

“Don’t you think she’d be—?” 

“No.” The response is immediate and absolutely certain. “She wants to live. More than anything, Jay wants to live.” 

He opens his mouth and he wants to tell her she’s projecting, wants to tell her Jaylen needs _rest_ more than anything, needs an ending they can mourn and be done with. They can’t live in a state of both constant grief and constant expectancy. She couldn’t want that for herself; she couldn’t want that for them. 

But of course she does. He remembers the wild look in her eye when she talked about those few brutal seasons she was gone, remembers her expression when she described the Trench, remembers how she’d tilted her face up into the rain once they were all alive again, a fierce, burning gratitude. 

Jaylen is always clawing her way out of the grave. It’s just who she is. Was. Will be again, if she gets her way.

Sutton looks at him again, finally, and there’s nothing in her eyes but understanding and what might be pity. “Hey. Mike. It’s fine. It’s over. Season seven was years ago now. You weren’t there. You couldn’t have known. You don’t have to stand by what she did.” 

“But you have to. And you _do.”_

Sutton sighs, and her eyes fall closed. “Yeah. I do.”   
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading, i really appreciate it! you can find me on tumblr @fourteenthidol for more blaseball thoughts, and if you were to leave a comment on this it'd mean the world to me. thanks again!


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